Cycles Updates & Asset Importer (Patreon)

Changes:

Skybox support for Cycles

Finally got around to adding support for skyboxes for the Cycles renderer! Since Blender/Cycles don't have support for cubemaps, I had to implement a converter to equirectangular images:

Here's an example with a HDR skybox:

Since the choice of skybox makes a huge difference in lighting when rendering with Cycles, I'll make sure to add an option to the Filmmaker to allow you to override the existing map skybox and choose your own instead.

General Cycles Updates

• Added support for GPU rendering with Cycles for AMD GPUs. I still have some issues to work out with NVIDIA GPUs, so no eta on that yet.

• Improved denoising quality with the Intel Open Image Denoiser by adding a normal/albedo render pass (not 100% implemented, but almost complete).

I also took some time to tweak the Cycles configuration in general. You can see the differences somewhat in the screenshot below (left is before, right is after the changes, although the lighting is slightly different, too), but I haven't had the time to render a high-resolution image with the new configuration yet.

Asset importer / Support for MikuMikuDance assets

I've added an asset importer to the model explorer, which allows you to import asset types that aren't directly supported by the Engine (such as FBX). Since I've had several requests for it, I also took a bit of time to add support for the MikuMikuDance PMX model format:

https://youtu.be/wFbCXwMSOYY

The importer automatically locates (or attempts to locate) the textures associated with the model and converts them to DDS (the default format for the Engine). Currently supports PNG, TGA, VTF and DDS, but I'll also add JPEG support in the future to make the import process as easy as possible.

I was going to showcase some more of the Filmmaker interface and release a new preview update today, but the Cycles changes took a bit longer than planned, so I'll have to push that back to next week (sorry!). I hope the new changes are still worthwhile :).